Winter Hill Self Portrait, Stories from the Past

Winter Hill Self Portrait, Stories from the Past

I am currently working on two large scale paintings, one a self-portrait in a landscape setting, and the other a landscape. I am also in the process of wrapping up the fall semester, and preparing for my two classes in the spring. It has been a month since I left my job at Pygmalion’s Art Supplies. I am beginning to re-imagine myself as an artist and teacher as I work.

The painting above is Winter Hill Self Portrait, 20”x20”, oil on canvas. I made it in 2005, three years after receiving my Certificate in Painting from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. The painting looks back to my life in 1987 living in the Winter Hill neighborhood of Somerville, Massachusetts.

In 2005 I was living alone in the house I had inherited since the passing of my parents. It was the house that my sister and I had grown up in, a five bedroom, three story twin built in 1900, in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. I was painting in the front room on the second floor, where my father’s office had been. Rooms on the second floor had a ten foot ceiling, and my father’s office had two north-facing windows and one facing west.  There was decorative marquetry around the border of the hardwood floor in what was my studio.

It was a solidly-built house, made of stone on the first floor, brick on the second, and timber on the third. Windowsills on the first floor were about two feet deep. Over the years some unevenness in the floor and ceiling due to settling had developed, including a crack in the ceiling on the second floor that looked pretty bad. In 2010, shortly before selling the house, I was grateful and relieved to have this problem fixed, once I had found someone who could do the work reliably for within my budget.

Being built in 1900, the house was old and drafty. In the winter heating all that space for one person was a challenge. I set the thermostat for between 56 and 60 degrees, and wore a hat, scarf, and layers of fleece indoors all winter.

In Winter Hill Self Portrait I am wearing a blue acrylic hat and a green quarter zip fleece that I got from the Pennywise Thrift Shop, which was just up the street from the house. It was what I wore living in Ardmore at that time, but the emotional content of the painting reminded me of my time living in Winter Hill in 1987. In the painting the expression of the portrait, wary and apprehensive, seemed a particularly good fit with my memory of myself in that previous time. And perhaps more importantly the way the colder blue is painted on top of the warmer blue above the head reminded me, and still does, of the top of Winter Hill, around Central Street and Broadway.

I lived in the front room of a second-floor apartment in a Somerville ‘triple-decker.’ My bedroom was large, and had originally been the living room of the apartment. What was originally a fireplace, cutting off one corner of the room, had been covered over. The walls, the baseboards, and the decorative molding around the fireplace were all painted the same clean white. Sliding pocket doors separated my room from the rest of the apartment. There was no closet, so I kept my clothes on a metal rack that I bought.

It was a decent apartment, but I was not happy living in Somerville. It was a mile walk from campus, and the town felt cold and unwelcoming. A dark underworld seemed to exist, David Lynch-style, just beneath the hard surface. In my neighborhood a police canine unit van was perpetually parked at the Dunkin’ Donuts at the intersection of Broadway and Medford Street. The house across the street from mine had every window boarded up, but didn’t look to be in a bad state of repair. Every now and then I would look through my window and see a procession of young and middle aged men file down a side hatch into the basement of the building.

Sometimes I painted in the basement of the building I lived in. I needed a place to work, and did not want to mess up my clean bedroom. Much later I discovered that using tarps to protect the walls and floor works quite well. But back then, when I went down to the basement to paint, a man living on the first floor would sometimes already be there. He would sit in a corner behind some shelves, listening to what sounded like two radios playing at once, one with music and the other with staccato, indecipherable talk, like a police radio or walkie-talkie. I would set up and start painting, for a while, but I had the sense that my neighbor strongly disapproved of my presence. Eventually I put down newspaper in my bedroom, and worked in black acrylic and sharpie instead of oil paint.

Later on I heard the “two radios at once” in a liquor store that I frequented, all too frequently, in the neighboring town Medford. At one point the owner of the store, a clean cut man in his 30’s, told me that this would be the last time that I would see him, he had had to sell the business. The next time I went in two men were sitting behind the counter. The two radios were playing. Hunched over and unshaven, in dirty, white, sleeveless, wide-necked a-shirts, the men did not greet the intruder into their space. One glared at me, irritated and bored, while the other listened to the radios.

While living in Somerville I was finishing work on my undergraduate degree in Comparative Religion. I worked late into the night typing out papers on a manual typewriter, mired in ambitious thinking, typing mistakes and wite-out. Around the time that I completed my last class at Tufts the proliferation of personal computing technology lead to the installation of a computer lab on campus. It felt like a near-life saving development. I used the lab to write my last undergrad papers and prepare copies of my resume.